Sunday, January 25, 2015

In the course of reading Carsten Stahn's (pretty lumbering) book The Law and Practice of International Territorial Administration, the following excerpt is encountered:

What is needed, in the immediate post-conflict period is not quick elections, democratic ferment, or economic "shock therapy" but a more controlled and gradual approach to liberalization, combined with the immediate building of government institutions that can manage these political and economic reforms. (Roland Paris, At War's End)

...or, phrased more succinctly, "institutionalization before liberalization."That, one is tempted to adjudge, sounds very reasonable in the first instance. It is at once logical and legally sound. It is consonant with the idea that democracy cannot be imposed but must perforce evolve: It has to be organic and autochthonous, and it can only develop as its foundations are gradually internalized among the dramatis personae (or, in modern parlance, the stakeholders). Stahn not only criticizes some territorial administration projects for having failed to secure the locals' backing (which is "old news") but shrewdly distinguishes between domestic consent and domestic support. He adroitly accentuates the importance of the latter as a conditio sine qua non for an international governance mission to stand any chance of success.Yet, on closer inspection the above postulates can be descried as suffering from a number of deficiencies and assumptions.For one thing, the reasoning is a standard Catch-22. The naissance of democracy is contingent on strong domestic "ownership" and local "capacity-building" (the buzzwords of "good governance" de nos jours); but how are these possible without the existence of a environment of liberalism, pluralism, and--yes--democracy? In other words, how can people freely decide what type of a government they wish to have (viz, internal self-determination) if there is no opportunity for them to express their views by way of a one-person-one-vote mechanism operating among a politically-educated electorate?